Before my fiancé and I go on our weekly food expedition, make sure the grocery shopping list channel is updated on our Discord server.
Every week we make a list of meals in one channel (called #meallist), sometimes with links to recipes. Then, before our grocery trip, we list all the ingredients in the grocery channel. The way we did this involved bickering over the same written paper as we determined what we needed and who was looking for what. Now, with access to the same digital list, we split and conquer the work in store. Adding items we run out of during the week is as simple as opening the app, tapping it, and pressing send.
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Disagreement was created as a way for gamers to play online with chat and voice conversations. In recent years, and at an accelerated pace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform has expanded into a more common space for socialization and everyday life. In our particular case, Discord has become an integral part of our household.
Leading more of our daily lives to Discord made sense: we had the app mostly open because it was a place where we spent the whole day going through messages and memes. The messaging platform was versatile enough to naturally become an indispensable tool for household management.
As someone who needs task lists to function, Discord has become a way to create a structured organizational system that still allows for flexibility and adaptability. New channels mean new lists, and each channel can be organized into a different category folder. We have channels for everything, from chores in the house to various great things to buy. Once a task is performed, we can simply respond with an emoji to indicate that it is finished.
But it’s not just work – we also use Discord to keep lists of movies we want to watch. We have one dedicated to photos that one of us has taken and the other one wants a copy, one that has only been updated for updates about our cat, and one for links that we need to save personally later. Disagreement makes it easy to add new channels, so when a new need arises (like my newfound list of “anime to watch”), we can simply add another channel or category. Of course, we communicate in person, but it is helpful to write things down immediately instead of spraying them out loud and expecting others to remember a grocery or a task.
Just as families have moved to the workplace management system Slack for household management, Discord seems unique to our more banal needs. Unlike Slack, which deletes messages to a certain point, the free version of Discord has unlimited messages so we can scroll back to find something. You can create categories for channels, something that my inner organization loves. But more importantly, Slack still carries the connotations of work and everything that goes with it; Disagreement is a tool we use in our free time.
People nowadays face a greater danger of burnout than ever before, and the pandemic has forced many to work where they play, Discord has become a kind of salvation for downtime and pleasure instead of work and the need for productivity. Our home server is actually our only shared server because we use Discord for different communities centered around our different hobbies and interests. In a way, we play up our household to-do list, making it less overwhelming than a mountain of chores and groceries. Disagreement allows us to streamline the state of mind of domestic activities – which in pandemic exclusion days can often seem terribly frightening – and thus minimize the wrong communication.
In general, we still use Discord for its features (that is, to talk to large groups of friends with whom we do not share a living space), but an app without an ambition to help us live our lives on the keeping track properly has become an important part of how we get through the week. This could mean buying groceries, choosing our Friday night movie, or just sending updates on what new, hot spot the cat is currently lying. It’s all there.